Gender Roles In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

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Gender Roles in Things Fall Apart: An essay

Patriarchy and gender roles have not just been a thing of a past. They still exist both in the modern world as well as developing countries. In the novel, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, the Ibo people’s patriarchal society has a strict structure of behavioral expectations according to gender. Men are expected to remain hard-working and aggressive throughout their life, while women are to stay submissive and yielding to their male counterparts. The novel’s main character, Okonkwo, is obsessed in proving his strength as a man, which proves that he fits the role of a proper man in the Ibo tribe.
Even as a young boy, Okonkwo had already started to despise his father’s weakness. Especially after Okonkwo’s playmate had called Unoka Agbala, or another name for women, “Okonkwo was ruled by one passion—to hate everything that …show more content…

Due to this fear, Okonkwo is unwilling to conform to the changes of Umuofia once the missionaries arrive. Okonkwo is incapable of self-acceptance. He bases his success and failure on his father’s and successively puts those same pressures on his children, leading Nwoye to hate his own father. Okonkwo cannot cope with the evolution of the tribe and village when the white men arrive which eventually makes his world “fall apart.” He feels he has no place in the “new” village and the old traditions are as unnecessary as he is. Since Okonkwo measures himself and others by standards that are no longer valid, he feels unimportant, which led him to commit suicide. Okonkwo fulfills his gender expectations in the society effectively by repeatedly demonstrating his assertive nature and proving his masculinity, which shows beyond doubt that he possesses the perfect and ideal nature of the standard Ibo man. Nevertheless, as the society changes, as well as its expectations, Okonkwo fails to do so, leading to his eventual

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